The Northwind is a personal website and blog for the exploration of the personal interests, the adventures, the successes, and the trials of its author. You'll find subjects from history, politics, and activism to technology, media, and video games.

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Nov 23 Location, location, location.

One of the interesting aspects of writing fiction, particularly sci-fi or fantasy work, has to be writing about locations. The real world is possessed of enough majesty to keep any reasonable human being in awe for the entirety of their natural lives, and even having explored and imaged virtually every square foot of our planet it still surprises us with new discoveries. The real world is governed all the same by well understood and predictable laws. It is possible with fantasy to build a world that evokes a sense of majesty by defying those principles, in simple or subtle ways that go unseen without the knowledge of how to look, or in grand and fantastic ways as the world swims through the cosmos on the back of a giant turtle.

Finding the right balance of the fantastic and the realistic, or the farcical and the logical can be key not only to captivating a reader but also to providing a sense of integration between the characters and the narrative. Everything happens somewhere and getting that somewhere to feel right for your story is an achievement. The description of a place not only informs the reader of it's importance but provides a history and meaning that spurs the imagination to build context into a wider world that you might never actually explore in words. A balance of the grandest and the smallest details help to forge a sense that the characters of your narrative occupy a space by invoking the senses that we use to observe the real world around us, even if much of that reality is acknowledged only subconsciously.